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quis, the headquarters for English, so this reporter risked charges of
being Anglo-centric by electing to stick to the Marriott. The place is
extraordinary . It's ugly, but on a monumental scale, with all the
right touches , from the forty-five-story atrium to the glass-walled
elevators, which seem designed to counter the effects of claustro–
phobia with the thrill of acrophobia. A revolving clock hangs over
the hotel's" main lobby, " which, being on the building's sixth floor ,
demands those inverted commas . You get there by escalator, and in–
deed, the Marriott relies on the escalator much as the Beaubourg
does.
It was on an escalator between sessions that I asked various in–
terlocutors to help me decipher "clitoral hermeneutics," a phrase
overheard on an earlier
escala~or.
It is , apparently, easy enough to
grasp the clitoral part of the equation, but the implications for
hermeneutics (that is, the interpretation of texts) seem elusive. I was
told that a synonym for this adventure in critical methodology is
"ovarian hermeneutics"; it is, according to one informant (an af–
fably non-doctrinaire veteran of graduate studies at Yale), cham–
pioned by those feminists who want to "valorize" the clitoris rather
then the vagina in "the binary opposition of sexual discourse."
Other feminists, my helpful guide explained, deride the concept as
"pseudo-phallicentric," since an emphasis on the clitoris might
arouse old bugbears, such as the view of the clitoris as an inadequate
penis . Now, what all this has to do with literary criticism or the
teaching profession is your guess or mine. For any of it to seem perti–
nent, you need to credit the absurd notion that gender itself can
amount to a formal dimension of a work of art. Certain professors ,
absurdists of the intellect, seem to find this easy enough to posit. Or
so I gathered on the escalator.
With as many as forty sessions taking place simultaneously–
more than seven hundred in all crammed between Saturday
night and Tuesday afternoon - a Balkanization effect was inevi–
table as the rival tribes of literary analysis found themselves
segregated in separate meeting rooms. In one room you could hear a
discussion of college teaching and the venerable educational ideal of
Matthew Arnold; in another, you could find out what's going on in
Australian literature today or the latest in D.H. Lawrence studies or
in semiotic approaches to children's literature . You had to keep
choosing, to indicate your allegiances in advance . "Male Anxiety,
Female Rage" conflicted with "Who Now Reads Oliver
Goldsmith?" and both of them went up against "Postmodernism
